Secrets of White House briefings - revealed!
It’s been staring me in the face all along, I don’t know how I’ve been missing it: Trey Parker and Matt Stone are philosophers of the highest order.
When the “Underpants Gnome” story first came out, we all mistook it for an e-Business allegory, ruthlessly skewering Internet “business models” long on optimism and short on details. It’s the stuff of internet memes by now, of course:
Phase 1 - Collect Underpants
Phase 2 - ?
Phase 3 - Profit
Ha ha ha. Kozmo.com, Pets.com, Webvan.com CEOs must have been gnashing their teeth at the screen. But - and maybe I’m the only one who didn’t realize this - Parker and Stone didn’t just nail the Internet bust with the underpants gnomes idea. They stumbled upon a grand philosophical allegory for modern American life.
I heard someone argue the other day that we shouldn’t worry too much about alternative fuels, because when we run out of oil, we’ll be forced to find alternatives. “Overcoming adversity is the American way!” So we have:
Phase 1 - Run out of oil
Phase 2 - ?
Phase 3 - Alternative energy-based society
Of course, the fact that Phase 2 in this case is “millions - even billions - starve to death” is an unfortunate truth. Hell, at least in this case, there is an imaginable Phase 2, as horrible as it is. Consider the biggest underpants gnomes working today: The Iraq hawks.
Yglesias says (emphasis mine):
The most important thing, as they note, is that this business of arming and training Iraqi security forces in the absence of a political solution is not just a waste of time and money, but directly counterproductive. Our weapons and funding are fueling civil conflict in the face of deep political fragmentation and there are absolutely no guarantees as to who these arms will be turned against next year or the year after that. “The medicine of more weapons and training for Iraq’s security force may actually end up killing the patient—and will certainly end up killing more Americans, too.” The training concept has become, in my view, a kind of psychological crutch for US elites who don’t want to face their own basic inability to improve things. The idea that you could help resolve an ongoing multifaceted conflict by introducing greater quantities of lethal weaponry and better-trained fighters is absurd on its face. At best, we’re in the position of arming several sides in a multi-pronged civil war in the vague hope that whoever prevails won’t notice we were also arming their adversaries and be loyal to us down the road, which seems like a really, really, really stupid bet.
To wit:
Phase 1: Escalate hostilities
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Peace
It’d be nice to believe that somewhere at conservative HQ* there’s a comprehensive and realistic anti-insurgency manual that outlines in painstaking detail what Phase 2 involves, because that belief - even if one doesn’t buy that it will work - is better than the belief I am quickly arriving at, which is that the question mark in Phase 2 is just as glaring to the wingnuts as it is to us; the difference is that they are ignoring it.
Whenever a Democrat, usually one running for office, decries a political problem of one kind or another, Republicans are quick to say “Oh yeah? Well, let’s see your suggestions”, ignoring the fact that said Democratic candidate quite often has a 15-point itemized plan with 13 subparagraphs for each action item and the co-signatures of 300 generals, or land-use managers, or health-care workers, or what have you.
Meanwhile, the right-wing plan for Iraq still boils down to the Parker-Stone calculus**:
Phase 1: Escalate hostilities
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Peace
Now, a sensible wingnut*** will argue at this point that it’s not, in fact, the US that is escalating hostilities; we’re simply responding to escalation with commensurate force. To which I say, it’s not that simple. First of all, when threatened with force of any kind, one has to calculate the proper response, a consideration which must take into account the end result of one’s response. If an action doesn’t lead towards an end to hostilities, that action is counter-productive. Given that fact, it is incumbent upon those who suggest an action that they explain how that action is productive. And this is where the reality-based community comes into play.
Suggestions like the Center for American Progress’ use reasoning not dissimilar to the oil-centered Parker-Stone calculus I mentioned before.
The United States cannot stabilize Iraq without serious action by Iraq’s leaders. The “no end in sight� strategy fosters a culture of dependency among Iraqis by propping up certain members of Iraq’s national government without fundamentally changing Iraq’s political dynamics. It does so at the cost of grinding down the strength of U.S. ground forces, as the readiness of these forces continues to decline. Our ground forces are so overstretched that many of our soldiers and Marines are being sent to Iraq without proper training and equipment, some multiple times; our National Guard has become an operational rather than strategic reserve.
There is a fundamental difference, though: The CAP plan has a Phase 2; it’s an ugly one. The argument being made, though, is that the only thing available to us is ugliness. If we withdraw, we force the Iraqis to make a change. And there is no doubt that this change will be bloody. It will even, as a commenter at Yglesias’ notes, quite possibly be bloodier than what we have now.
While suicide bombings killing 70 people are horrific, I wonder how we will repond to hundreds or even thousands of people being slaughtered in a single day.
And of course, he’s right. The problem is, this is going to happen eventually, anyway. To quote Ape Man (to whom the Yglesias hat tip goes) via IM:
“Training the Iraqis to do the job we’re doing” when the job we’re doing is waging war against a large segment of the Iraqi population is merely a prescription for intensifying the civil war…it’s an interesting and somewhat sickening inversion that has been foisted on the US population in my lifetime. We talk about law enforcement as if it were warmaking, and warmaking as if it were law enforcement. The two are not only not the same, they are actually two opposite approaches to similar sets of problems.
The right wants us to think of our activities in Iraq as a war of attrition: If we keep pounding them hard enough, the insurgency will shrink to a size which is manageable by the Iraqi troops we’re training up, at which point we can leave and peace will settle into Iraq. The truth is that attrition is a tactic used by a group with inexhaustible resources against a group with finite resources, and in the case of an insurgency, that makes it the insurgents who are waging a war of attrition against us. The much more likely (and probably observable) outcome is that our tactics, as indiscriminate as they often are, are helping to grow the insurgency, which means that every day we are there compounds another “suicide bombing killing 70 people” in addition to the essentially inevitable future of “hundreds or even thousands of people being slaughtered in a single day.”
Sure, it’s fatalistic. I will be accused of being blase about post-occupation violence. But I am not. This war was a fucking travesty at conception, a fucking travesty at execution, and every day it continues simply adds to the eventual reckoning. And no amount of underpants gnome thinking is going to salvage the situation.
Phase 1 - Escalate hostilities
Phase 2 - Hostilities escalate
Phase 3 - Escalate hostilities
It’s the only possible outcome.
* Or, for that matter, at the Pentagon.
** Think it’ll catch on?
*** Snicker.
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To meld another pop culture reference to the three-pronged approach, phase two can be filled in with “yadda, yadda, yadda.”
I hollared “Profits!” just this morning when doing laundry- beneath the underwear and socks were 35 cents.
And here’s Bush saying he never watches TV and goes to bed by 9pm. Guess he sets the TiVo.
I wonder how long he had to practice that “thoughtful” look before he could do it without hitting his eyes with the glasses.
Let’s not forget the Democratic Congressional Leadership’s version of this from this Spring:
Of course, we now know what Phase 2, so the current Congressional Underpants Gnome vision is:
This was entirely predictable, but it still doesn’t make any sense.
Quibble: Kozmo was actually viable in the density of NYC. The asshat running it got rich off of his inflated salary while selling investors a scam of a plan to expand into markets where Kozmo wouldn’t work. Like a pyramid scheme it limped along attracting more and more investment money (further enriching said asshat) until it imploded and the hief walked away a rich man.
It’s was a shame for the folks who lost their jobs (I got out early when I saw what was going on and they got draconian in efforts to corporatize in an attempt to get even more investment money), but IMO it’s even more of a shame for destroying a model that *could* work in certain cities with enough density. Because of Kozmo’s later shitty business practises and miserable reputation sticks to the idea.
Sorry for the off-topic, good post!
:)
The U.S. is being kept in Iraq by two concerns:
1) No U.S. military in Iraq, no claim to profits on Iraqi oil for U.S. corporations.
2) No U.S. military hegemony in ME, no reason for world to continue pricing oil in U.S. dollars, and no reason to continue supporting massive U.S. trade and budget deficits. In such a case, the fact that the U.S. manufacturing base in now located in China will have extremely serious social consequences.
The rest is bullshit.
The Democrats know this as well as the Republicans, which is why they almost all voted for the war, and why they (almost) all continue to take the very serioius political risks of supporting it, and why they will go on doing so.
The U.S. has demonstrated to the satisfaction of nearly everyone that it has tremendous power to destroy; but it has yet to demonstrate that it has any power to command obedience. I expect that, barring the die-hard neo-cons, the political establishment longs for the good old days when America did nothing but was thought omnipotent.
Well, putting violent idiots in charge of foreign policy may have seemed like a good idea at the time. Iraq was both pathetically weak and fantastically wealthy. Now it doesn’t look like such a hot idea anymore, but what else is there?
Hence the ???.
The real problem is that the transition needs long term planning - which to Wall Street means “the end of the current fiscal quarter.” Gas and oil demand is “price inelastic” (price elastic goods are ones where you cut back usage quickly when the price goes up - gas prices jump quite a bit before people start using mass transit or carpools.)
Comes the day when the magic spigot runs dry, and prices skyrocket, we’ll have an economy dependent on diesel trucks to deliver goods, and gas-powered cars to get to work, because there wasn’t enough motivation to change. Once the spigot runs dry, there’ll be no time to seek alternatives.
for about a year this meme, always ending with step n-1: ? step n: Profit! was the substance of every 7th or 10th comment in the threads at /.
But yeah it applies. start a war for all the wrong reasons and not a fxxking clue how it should wind up, sell it to the voters for a different set of reasons and fairytales about the costs and what a surprise that it is an ugly interminable mess. How will we write these after 2008?
The truth is that attrition is a tactic used by a group with inexhaustible resources against a group with finite resources, and in the case of an insurgency, that makes it the insurgents who are waging a war of attrition against us.
Sure, you say that. But you forget this formula:
1) Escalate hostilities
2) God likes us better
3) Everyone gets a grateful Iraqi servant
See?
It’d be nice to believe that somewhere at conservative HQ* there’s a comprehensive and realistic anti-insurgency manual that outlines in painstaking detail what Phase 2 involves, because that belief - even if one doesn’t buy that it will work - is better than the belief I am quickly arriving at, which is that the question mark in Phase 2 is just as glaring to the wingnuts as it is to us; the difference is that they are ignoring it.
I think there’s a third, more likely option here. The Underpants Gnomes approach is basically the application of the non-sequitur fallacy to planning. The wingnuts have shown no ability to recognise fallacious thinking - or if they do recognise it, they like it.
I suspect that they are competely unaware that there should be anything at step 2 at all. You can see it everywhere, from the war to sex ed to drugs policy, etc, etc. Name any policy area you like, and you will find Underpants Gnomes.
I disagree with your oil conclusion, because we aren’t going to have oil one day, and then not the next. It’ll be a slow and gradual process. Oil will gradually become more and more scarce, driving the price up more and more as China and India continue to industrialize further and consume more oil than ever before. This will drive the price up, making things like extracting the oil currently trapped in Canadian sand (and a lot of other already known deposits of oil too expensive to extract right now) economically viable for the first time. This will help prolong the process of running out and make it a very gradual thing.
We’ve also got tons of oil in Alaska that’s currently off limits, but when America starts demanding cheaper prices at the pump politicans will pander to the masses.
At the same time, with gradually (and continually rising oil prices) it’ll be easier and easier and easier for other fuel sources to compete in the market.
Remember, none of the current renewable fuel legislation has anything to do with the environment. Ethanol from corn will never be the solution. There is almost no net gain in energy in making it from corn and ethanol wrecks pipelines, which means it has to be trucked everywhere.
Ethanol from sugar cane is another matter all together, but Dems and Repubs alike slapped a big ole import tax on it to make sure Americans don’t buy any cost effective, energy efficient, and evironmentally friendly ethanol from Brazilians, so we can spend way more subsidizing American farmers and use the kind of ethanol that doesn’t benefit the environment at all.
But that’s good right, because it fights globalization?
The key piece of either use of the analogy is someone running the plan who is free from actual accountability.
The CEO of these crazy internet start ups had nothing to lose. They got huge salaries and had exit compensation parachutes. If the company did good they were raking in money. If the company failed they raked in money, jumped ship when it failed with fistfulls of money and went somewhere else. They had nothing to lose.
The same goes for the war. When their plan doesn’t work they have no actual penalty upon them. They still get their paycheck and get to walk away to govt. retirement at the end of their term. They bear no real personal risk for the huge problem they created.
Jim Kunstler has made the point that the current energy strategy, even from the Dem candidates, is ‘how do we keep the cars running?’ Everything is predicated on keeping the cars running. The entire energy economy will be directed towards this goal, and that’s just not sustainable. I may not subscribe to his full scenario, but his overall thesis — the US, in particular, has to Make Other Arrangements — holds true: both globalisation and suburbanisation are the products of a historical anomaly of cheap hydrocarbons that’s coming to an end. The oil of the future will be hard to extract, and/or in places that are fought over.
(I have a Kozmo messenger bag, that I bought out of dot-com boom nostalgia. It’s not bad.)
Unfortunetly, that episode also had the “big business is better than mom & pop business cause they’re big” idea. And that idea was from the Underwear Gnomes, and yet it was treated as right. Trey & Parker are incrediable hit and miss.
Brazilian sugar ethanol is absolutely not environmentally friendly. I’d rather not pump the last of the Amazonian rainforest into my gas tank.
I think that in the mind of most conservatives, phase 2 involved massive Iraqi casualties, in the hope of taking out as many insurgents as possible amid the general bloodshed. All in the compassionate spirit of “kill them all! God will know his own,” of course. And somehow, after all the bombs and burning napalm, the few survivors would love us (as we all know, love is like a heatwave).
Unfortunately, even the dimmest war supporter tends to realize that it would be improper to publicly advocate such a strategy, especially in light of the stated goal of the war: establishing a shiny beacon of democracy in the Middle East. After all, unless you live in Louisiana, dead people don’t vote. So the wingnuts can only whine and harrumph and stamp their feet and bay at the moon.
Ms. Marcotte and some of the commenters here are shockingly ignorant about the military, to wit;
“It’d be nice to believe that somewhere at conservative HQ* there’s a comprehensive and realistic anti-insurgency manual that outlines in painstaking detail what Phase 2 involves, because that belief - even if one doesn’t buy that it will work - is better than the belief I am quickly arriving at, which is that the question mark in Phase 2 is just as glaring to the wingnuts as it is to us; the difference is that they are ignoring it.”
There is no question mark at 2. It is the COIN manual written by GEN Petraeus and LTG Mattis after several years of experience here. It’s techniques are tried and true in COIN ops.
Everyone is entiteld to their opinion of course; just don’t pretend the opinion you have is based on anything other than your own wishful thinking.
Remember last year when the anti-war types globbed onto the intelligence report that indicated Al Anbar was lost?
What do you have to say now that Al Anbar has turned around and gone from the most violent place in Iraq to one of the least? It was all based on the things in the COIN manual.
Would that be the same Al Anbar for which an “early afternoon attack [in Baghdad] risked derailing an emerging alliance between Sunni Muslim tribal leaders in long-restive Al Anbar province and the country’s Shiite Muslim majority the day after a key round of negotiations to formalize their relationship with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s government”?
Auguste: Now, now. Be fair- he said it was one of the least violent places _in Iraq_. It’s all relative, y’know.
Yes. Al Qaeda certainly is trying to kill the sheikhs on the ASC. Does one attack by the enemy somehow make it a failure? Of course not. AQIZ is a brutal enemy and the enemy gets a vote.
And Kelyssa the attack took place in Baghdad not Al Anbar. That is where the enemy is trying to make a big splash so that you will be discouraged. (Or maybe with you folks it is encouraged, I can never be sure.)
You are certainly entitled to your opinions, but if you have never been in the military, never studied COIN operations, and/or never been to Iraq, your opinions are based on limited knowledge and facts.
It would be nice if one you chose to address the fact that all the naysayers about Al Anbar last year, proved to be completely wrong.
Holy Fuck. You mean…Parker and Stone…are geniuses? No, can’t be…maybe idiot savants?
This could be fun though…
Phase 1: Invade Iraq
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Eliminate WMD threat!
oops…
Phase 1: Invade Iraq
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Cheap oil!
oops…
Phase 1: Invade Iraq
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Peaceful, Pro-U.S., democratic governments throughout the Middle East!
oops…
Phase 1: Invade Iraq
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Defeat Al Qaeda!
oops…
Phase 1: Invade Iraq
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Stable Iraq!
oops…
Phase 1: Invade Iraq
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: George Bush is the Greatest President Evah!
oops…
Hmm…something’s not working…
Funny - I didn’t know the original air date of this episode before checking it just now. I first saw it in the runup to the Iraq invasion and just assumed it was a response to the rationale for the invasion given by the Bush administration and its supporters.
Pretty much every plan created by the Bush admin. for Iraq both before and since the invasion has fit this mold. There is never, ever a real answer to the question of just how this or that action is actually going to make a positive difference. It’s almost like the war is just seen as a theoretical problem, something that the (specially intellectually gifted of course) think tanks can just figure out sooner or later, you know, after breaking a few eggs with the power of their monster brains. (Thinking about think tanks always brings out my snarkiness.)
One thing’s for sure, for all these egg shells that are piling up we should have one monster freaking omelette by now.
Of course, the subtler joke was the existence of real-life businesses that make a profit by collecting underpants (the precise nature of phase 2 is rather too icky to mention here.)
Personally, I’m apalled by the percentage of the population who STILL seems to be working on
Phase 1. Elect Republicans
Phase 2. ?
Phase 3. Things get better.